Becoming Lovely, Chapter Four
Title: Becoming Lovely, Chapter Four
Form: Novella
Written: November, 2010
Rating: M (just to be safe)
Word Count: 1,300 (this chapter), 16,000 (total)
Summary: Mia's best friend died five minutes after confessing to cheating with her boyfriend. Now Mia wants to change herself, and becoming someone different.
Authors Notes: This was written for the Somerset Novella Competition 2011. It's been a long time coming onto the web because of this. Suffice to say I didn't win anything. However, enjoy.
I get called in to work later in the afternoon. I take over from a new girl who looks happy to be leaving, and the store manager’s there, unloading boxes full of books out the back, most of them shipments of books we’ve had for years but have run out of recently.
I stand in the doorway of the back room and watch Leigh. He’s got this bushy beard that you could hide orange Tic Tac’s in. When I first met him, I was utterly captivated by it.
“How you doing, Mia?” he asks me.
I shrug. The door signals and I turn to see a regular come in. She smiles at me and I give her a small smile in return. Like all regulars, I’ve got no idea what her name is. She’s got this awesome canvas bag and she buys lots of fantasy/romance books.
The manager’s seen her too. He smiles. Leigh smiles at anything.
Leigh takes a box, hands it to me, then grabs three for himself, like he’s trying to show off, but I worked out a while ago that he just does it because he can. He doesn’t really care about other people’s opinions. I mean, with a beard like that, how could you care about other people’s opinions?
The regular customer is standing at the counter with no book. I notice for the first time that her hair’s brown. She smiles again at me and Leigh says hello as if they’ve had a thousand conversations, and they might have, for all I know.
She looks at me, and asks about something I was reading last week. I make it no secret to costumers that I read in store, but Leigh doesn’t know about it. Or at least, I don’t think he does. I wonder, while she’s rambling about the book I still don’t know the name of, what Leigh will think. For a moment, I imagine I get sacked for disregarding store policy for my entire year of employment, and I’m unsurprisingly calm, if not slightly happy about it.
It’d be one less connection. One more thing to lose from my old life. One more step from what I was to what I want to be.
The regular is looking at me, waiting. She’s stopped talking. I hadn’t really listened. All I really took in was a few weeks ago, Young Adult book, and something about romance. It’s vague. I feel a little vague, imaging getting fired.
And in that sort of way that things click, I remember that it was the hardback blue book that I loved with the coloured writing.
“Werewolves?” I prompt, and she nods.
“It’s Shiver. Still in hardback, I’m afraid, but totally worth it for the blue writing.” I gesture to the teenage section with a hand and smile.
* * *
Leigh doesn’t grill me. He doesn’t say anything about it, which makes me feel like he already knows and I’m a little disappointed, because I kinda want to have something happen.
I have an urge for this good job to be destroyed. And yet, it isn’t. I don’t overtly want it destroyed, but I also kind of wouldn’t have mind if it was.
It was how I treated people at school. I told them exactly what was on my mind, completely deserving my title of bitch, and I still seemed to have friends at the end of the day. Not nice friends a lot of the time, but there were still people who liked me, who wanted me.
I did it with my class work, too. Alicia thought I was stupid, throwing caution to the wind. She liked to point out that my full scholarship at the school could be revoked if I acted out too much, got suspended too much, wagged too much. And if I didn’t have the scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to go there, because my family is not rich with thousands of dollars lying around like Alicia’s family and all of my friend’s families do.
It wasn’t even exhilarating, experimenting throwing everything to the fan. It was just kinda disappointing to see that it all came back to me unscathed. Nothing, except the odd unimportant friendship, seemed to get hurt. And what I lost…I never really needed in the first place.
Looking at the prospect of living without friends, a boyfriend, Alicia - anyone - seems okay. I don’t look at it in a anxious way like I did the two years where I tried the 40 Hour Famine and ate the contents of the house in fear in the days leading up to it. No. I feel totally relaxed about it all.
I must be unattached. So very unattached. Is that normal? I’ve never really cared, because caring about being normal meant not turning the bowl of half whipped egg whites upside down. And every time I did turn the bowl of half whipped egg whites upside down, I was disappointed to find that none of it fell out anyway.
And that happening to me, every single time, made me feel so not normal anyway. Like I got everything too easy. Like I was somehow special. And I didn’t really deserve to be special.
* * *
“What do you like reading?”
Leigh’s still here. I‘ve nearly asked him how long he’s staying twice now, but I don’t feel like being rude. Even though that would be another way to destroy things.
“I don’t know, a lot of things.” I’ve been staring at the sides of the boxes in the crack of door to the backroom for the past ten minutes. I’ve got that urge to read something angsty, preferably romantic. Or some really complicated fantasy story. Maybe Terry Pratchett. “Teenage, mostly. Normal things.”
Leigh hasn’t looked at me once. He’s been cataloguing books, and ordering. He stares at the teenage book section and bites his lip. “You like fantasy? Paranormal? Adventure? Action? Romance? You know, you can tell a lot about a person by what they read.”
I don’t know if you’d be able to tell anything about me from what I read. Other than I want a boyfriend, which I had at one point and now really don’t want. So even that theory is out of the picture.
I look at him and kind of shrug one shoulder. “I don’t really have a preference. It all depends on what mood I’m in,” I reason. I think it’s more to me than to Leigh; trying to work out what I want to say, what I want to explain. Alicia used to have a look that she brought out like a party trick every time I spoke like this. It made Tessa laugh. It was one of the many things that me and Tessa argued over.
“I see a lot of people come in here, and they all buy different things.”
I nod. I already know this.
“The most interesting thing is what the staff here read, because they get to stare at all these books, all the time.” He pauses, typing an order onto the computer. He glances at me for a moment, and I try to ascertain where he’s going with this, but there’s no direction.
I’ve always been shaky with reading people, but this takes it to a whole new level. There is no way for me to tell what’s going on. No background. Nothing.
Leigh looks over to a sheet of paper and then continues with his work.
“But the really interesting thing is that you’re the first to actually pick up book after book and read. That’s very interesting.”
Chapter Five
Form: Novella
Written: November, 2010
Rating: M (just to be safe)
Word Count: 1,300 (this chapter), 16,000 (total)
Summary: Mia's best friend died five minutes after confessing to cheating with her boyfriend. Now Mia wants to change herself, and becoming someone different.
Authors Notes: This was written for the Somerset Novella Competition 2011. It's been a long time coming onto the web because of this. Suffice to say I didn't win anything. However, enjoy.
I get called in to work later in the afternoon. I take over from a new girl who looks happy to be leaving, and the store manager’s there, unloading boxes full of books out the back, most of them shipments of books we’ve had for years but have run out of recently.
I stand in the doorway of the back room and watch Leigh. He’s got this bushy beard that you could hide orange Tic Tac’s in. When I first met him, I was utterly captivated by it.
“How you doing, Mia?” he asks me.
I shrug. The door signals and I turn to see a regular come in. She smiles at me and I give her a small smile in return. Like all regulars, I’ve got no idea what her name is. She’s got this awesome canvas bag and she buys lots of fantasy/romance books.
The manager’s seen her too. He smiles. Leigh smiles at anything.
Leigh takes a box, hands it to me, then grabs three for himself, like he’s trying to show off, but I worked out a while ago that he just does it because he can. He doesn’t really care about other people’s opinions. I mean, with a beard like that, how could you care about other people’s opinions?
The regular customer is standing at the counter with no book. I notice for the first time that her hair’s brown. She smiles again at me and Leigh says hello as if they’ve had a thousand conversations, and they might have, for all I know.
She looks at me, and asks about something I was reading last week. I make it no secret to costumers that I read in store, but Leigh doesn’t know about it. Or at least, I don’t think he does. I wonder, while she’s rambling about the book I still don’t know the name of, what Leigh will think. For a moment, I imagine I get sacked for disregarding store policy for my entire year of employment, and I’m unsurprisingly calm, if not slightly happy about it.
It’d be one less connection. One more thing to lose from my old life. One more step from what I was to what I want to be.
The regular is looking at me, waiting. She’s stopped talking. I hadn’t really listened. All I really took in was a few weeks ago, Young Adult book, and something about romance. It’s vague. I feel a little vague, imaging getting fired.
And in that sort of way that things click, I remember that it was the hardback blue book that I loved with the coloured writing.
“Werewolves?” I prompt, and she nods.
“It’s Shiver. Still in hardback, I’m afraid, but totally worth it for the blue writing.” I gesture to the teenage section with a hand and smile.
* * *
Leigh doesn’t grill me. He doesn’t say anything about it, which makes me feel like he already knows and I’m a little disappointed, because I kinda want to have something happen.
I have an urge for this good job to be destroyed. And yet, it isn’t. I don’t overtly want it destroyed, but I also kind of wouldn’t have mind if it was.
It was how I treated people at school. I told them exactly what was on my mind, completely deserving my title of bitch, and I still seemed to have friends at the end of the day. Not nice friends a lot of the time, but there were still people who liked me, who wanted me.
I did it with my class work, too. Alicia thought I was stupid, throwing caution to the wind. She liked to point out that my full scholarship at the school could be revoked if I acted out too much, got suspended too much, wagged too much. And if I didn’t have the scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to go there, because my family is not rich with thousands of dollars lying around like Alicia’s family and all of my friend’s families do.
It wasn’t even exhilarating, experimenting throwing everything to the fan. It was just kinda disappointing to see that it all came back to me unscathed. Nothing, except the odd unimportant friendship, seemed to get hurt. And what I lost…I never really needed in the first place.
Looking at the prospect of living without friends, a boyfriend, Alicia - anyone - seems okay. I don’t look at it in a anxious way like I did the two years where I tried the 40 Hour Famine and ate the contents of the house in fear in the days leading up to it. No. I feel totally relaxed about it all.
I must be unattached. So very unattached. Is that normal? I’ve never really cared, because caring about being normal meant not turning the bowl of half whipped egg whites upside down. And every time I did turn the bowl of half whipped egg whites upside down, I was disappointed to find that none of it fell out anyway.
And that happening to me, every single time, made me feel so not normal anyway. Like I got everything too easy. Like I was somehow special. And I didn’t really deserve to be special.
* * *
“What do you like reading?”
Leigh’s still here. I‘ve nearly asked him how long he’s staying twice now, but I don’t feel like being rude. Even though that would be another way to destroy things.
“I don’t know, a lot of things.” I’ve been staring at the sides of the boxes in the crack of door to the backroom for the past ten minutes. I’ve got that urge to read something angsty, preferably romantic. Or some really complicated fantasy story. Maybe Terry Pratchett. “Teenage, mostly. Normal things.”
Leigh hasn’t looked at me once. He’s been cataloguing books, and ordering. He stares at the teenage book section and bites his lip. “You like fantasy? Paranormal? Adventure? Action? Romance? You know, you can tell a lot about a person by what they read.”
I don’t know if you’d be able to tell anything about me from what I read. Other than I want a boyfriend, which I had at one point and now really don’t want. So even that theory is out of the picture.
I look at him and kind of shrug one shoulder. “I don’t really have a preference. It all depends on what mood I’m in,” I reason. I think it’s more to me than to Leigh; trying to work out what I want to say, what I want to explain. Alicia used to have a look that she brought out like a party trick every time I spoke like this. It made Tessa laugh. It was one of the many things that me and Tessa argued over.
“I see a lot of people come in here, and they all buy different things.”
I nod. I already know this.
“The most interesting thing is what the staff here read, because they get to stare at all these books, all the time.” He pauses, typing an order onto the computer. He glances at me for a moment, and I try to ascertain where he’s going with this, but there’s no direction.
I’ve always been shaky with reading people, but this takes it to a whole new level. There is no way for me to tell what’s going on. No background. Nothing.
Leigh looks over to a sheet of paper and then continues with his work.
“But the really interesting thing is that you’re the first to actually pick up book after book and read. That’s very interesting.”
Chapter Five